Many methods involving the processing of liquids or materials carried by liquids benefit from the use of liquid handling systems configured to enable high-throughput processing and utilize a high degree of automation. Such processing may involve the measurement or assaying of a large number of chemical or biological samples in parallel, or the synthesis of chemical or biological products from a large number of precursor materials. Liquid handling systems have been developed that utilize a motorized pipettor capable of dispensing liquids into and aspirating liquids from the individual wells of multi-well plates loaded onto such systems. Such systems may also utilize a robot to load and unload multi-well plates.
There is an ongoing need, however, to develop systems and methods capable of transferring small quantities of liquids, including liquids carrying materials of interest, from one location to another. There is also an ongoing need to develop systems and methods capable of transferring liquids to and from liquid-supporting devices of different formats, such as flat slides and multi-well plates. There is also an ongoing need to develop systems and methods capable of providing a source of a large number of different liquids or materials, enabling specific liquids or materials to be selected from that source, and thereafter transferring the selected liquids or materials to specific destination sites situated remotely from the source. For certain applications entailing synthesis, it would be desirable to provide a large array of precursor materials at a source location, and then transfer selected precursor materials to a different location for further processing instead of carrying out the synthesis at the same (source) location.